32 bit application on 64 bit RHEL 6 (spss)

Apparently SPSS 21 is unsupported on 64 bit RHEL 6, but people have gotten it to work. It looks like you can get it to work by installing a number of 32 bit libraries, but IBM won't tell me what they are.

On Debian they say installing the ia32-libs package will take care of it, but RHEL doesn't have a simple equivalent package. Any suggestions?

I have no idea what SPSS is, but generally you can just install the i686 versions of whatever libs a program requires, for example libstdc++ would be installed by running "yum install libstdc++.i686" .The ia32-libs package is a metapackage with commonly used 32-bit libs, Redhat doesn't have any equivalent. If you can't find a list you could always use ldd to see what libraries it wants and just search for those with "yum provides '*/somelib.so'.

By default, I believe RHEL/CentOS 6 only install architecture-required packages when you call for an install; if you change exactarch to 0 in /etc/yum.conf I'm not sure if it will actively seek out both versions, but like Sunner said adding .i386 or .i686 to an install name usually works.

You can try yum install compat-libraries and see if that pulls in the ones required for SPSS, my guess is it's looking for some fairly elderly/esoteric libraries (I know Oracle does too).

By default, I believe RHEL/CentOS 6 only install architecture-required packages when you call for an install; if you change exactarch to 0 in /etc/yum.conf I'm not sure if it will actively seek out both versions, but like Sunner said adding .i386 or .i686 to an install name usually works.

You can try yum install compat-libraries and see if that pulls in the ones required for SPSS, my guess is it's looking for some fairly elderly/esoteric libraries (I know Oracle does too).

I eventually figured it out by installing most of the libraries from this web page

Not all of them were available for RHEL 6, but I installed the ones that were available, and it was enough to make it work. Stupid, and unscientific, but the user in question is happy now so I can go on to other things.